Set Me Alight (14 page)

Chapter 14

I was going mad waiting for the elevator to reach its apex. I needed to get to the top floor, find Mr. Plunder and Christine and then, and then, what? Dammit, what the hell was there left for me to do? Paul was gone – I mean he was actually gone now – and I was sure they had more big burly men upstairs waiting to bash my skull in. My only hope was that I would catch them off guard, not expecting me to have had survived the confrontation with their hired hitman. I was going to burst in, and, and, demand they handed over incriminating documentation? Then I could go to the police, or the press, or the government, or, I don’t know, something. I hadn’t thought through a real plan. I was running on adrenaline and rage. Fuck you, Paul, for that shit on me. ‘Finish this’? Finish it how, Paul? It would have been really nice for you to have provided me with some concrete advice and not some vague bullshit. I stood there in the elevator, waiting to go up one hundred and some odd floors, and tried to plan out my next move. I wasn’t a planning sort of man. I wasn’t much a doing man, either. I’m not sure what kind of man I was, really. I was mostly a scared, lonely man. That was about all I could hang my hat on. I was ill-suited to do what the situation called for. That was the kind of man I was. ‘The wrong man, at the wrong place, at the wrong time.’ That would be my grave stone’s epitaph. Though, t be realistic, I wasn’t going to have a gravestone, I was going to be ground up and burned to dust once Mr. Plunder and his goons found me. Well, you’re welcome Mr. Plunder, because I was putting on my best action hero impersonation and was coming straight to you. There was no need for you to send out a search party. I would be right outside your office in a matter of minutes.

The elevator doors opened and no one appeared to be in the hall. I still had a few more moments left to live. I just needed to waltz on down to Mr. Plunder’s office, hope he was still there, and then somehow force him to hand over all the information I needed to bring Megalomerate to its knees. I would need enough incriminating information to make a lot of very rich people want to see me dead. The kind of people, who when they want to see someone dead, actually do get to see them die before their very eyes. I always figured I would die pathetic and alone. Here was my chance to die with an audience. A mocking, cruel audience who would never feel a joy as great as when they saw my life slip away from my desperate grasp. That may be a bit of an exaggeration. I’m sure they will have felt joys much greater than watching my sorry ass die. Doing lines of coke off a stripper’s asshole being just one of those many joys.

Walking down the hall, I found another one of those Fire Emergency axes that seemed to be so plentiful in the building. Whoever designed the place must have felt that the poor occupants were all but guaranteed to get trapped in a fire and forced to cut their way out, with no hope of being rescued by the fire department. Whatever the reason for all of them, the axe down in the Freedom Dungeon proved to be helpful enough. Sure, that Neanderthal of a man Paul and I had to take down seemed to take an axe blow like it was a reassuring pat on the back, but I felt confident that Mr. Plunder wouldn’t fare quite as well. I don’t know what I planned to accomplish by planting an axe in Mr. Plunder’s back, but I was sure I would get some sort of satisfaction from doing it. The sweet satisfaction of watching a billion dollar net worth unable to do anything to protect him any longer.

I stood only a few feet from Mr. Plunder’s office. I had arrived at my final destination. I could see that the door was open, and it sounded like someone was moving frantically around inside. There was no need for me sneak up to the office – they were making enough noise in there to drown out a trampling elephant. As I moved toward the door and got closer, I could hear Mr. Plunder yelling at someone. Drawers and cabinet doors were being opened and then slammed closed. I walked to the edge of the door and peered inside the office. I saw Mr. Plunder and Christine running around the office, rooting through all of those drawers and cabinets I saw locked before, pulling out the documents, and then throwing them into a burning trash can.

“What the hell are you two doing in here?”

Both of them stopped what they were doing. Mr. Plunder’s face turned bright red, and then he shouted at me, “Pete!? What the hell are you doing up here? There’s no way you and Paul could have survived the dog I sent after you.”

“Well, Mr. Plunder, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that only I survived your ‘dog’. Paul and that mutt of yours weren’t so lucky.”

“Whatever, it makes no difference now. Christine and I are almost done cleaning up the mess you and Paul started down there. It’s all being burned, and it’s all over for you. You two had a pretty clever plan, I’ll give you that. The execution was just a little flat.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play coy with me, Pete. You and Paul were somehow able to break into our computer systems, and send out messages to the press and the police and government agencies to come down here for something ‘big’. Ha! You were able to send out some leaked information, enough to get their attention, but nothing that’s going to put me behind bars. We aren’t dumb, Pete. We don’t store any of that information online for some snot nosed little computer hacker like you and Paul to break into and ruin everything we’ve worked so hard to create. What you really needed to leak is all in here: the documents contained in these drawers. It’s too late now, though. It’s all going to burn by the time anyone gets here and there isn’t a thing you can do about it.”

That was what Paul was doing on the computer before the hulking killing machine rudely interrupted us. You son of a gun, Paul. You always played it close to your chest. It would have been nice to be let in on his little plan, but I guess there wasn’t much time for him to explain things to me. He told me enough with his last breath.

“You’re not going to get away with this, Mr. Plunder!”

“And why would you say something as stupid as that, Pete?”

“The people know enough. They know about the water in Montana, and everything else you guys have been doing to destroy that region. They know enough to start asking questions. Questions you and your kind are going to have a hard time answering. It’s over, Mr. Plunder. You won’t be able to plunder the American people any longer.”

“HAHAHA! Oh, Pete, you sweet naïve little child. ‘The people’ are going to start asking us questions? What people? People like you? Who gives a shit what some piss poor commoner like you thinks? Go ahead, ask me your questions. ‘Are you illegally dumping mining waste in local water supplies?’ Of course we are! ‘Are you arbitrarily raising prices on food and gas just to stuff your wallet a little thicker?’ You bet your sweet ass we are! ‘Was all of this possible by using your wealth to buy political power allowing you to form a monopoly to control the supply of all necessary goods and services? Allowing you to toy with the American consumers as you wish?’ Yes, yes it is, and it is the most beautiful thing mankind has ever created. Imagine, a chosen few who have risen so high that the lives of all they see around them lay in the palms of their hands. I go home to my literal ivory tower, and look out over my dominion. Except that my dominion stretches beyond as far as my eyes can see, it stretches across the whole of the world. You commoners toil away day after day, never able to climb out of the pit of misery you find yourselves in – all to serve me. I have the power to bring your lives crashing down on a whim. Hell, I could bring all of modern society crashing down if the mood struck me!”

“What about the government? The police? They have to be able to keep you in check.”

“The government? Ha! Listen to yourself, Pete! You’ll always be a naïve child. The government has been bought and paid for. Look at the world around you, for God’s sake man! We’re in the so called ‘Freedom Tower’, and what is it filled with? Corporations! What a heavy handed metaphor for American society. Your ‘freedom’ extends as far as the corporations allow it, and we’ve decided your freedom isn’t going to extend very far. Every law that’s ever passed, who do you think its helping? You? Ha! The dream of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, died a long time ago. Long before the two of us were even born. Money talks in this world, Pete, and you people lost your voice – a voice that will never be recovered again. I’m the only one left who can afford to have ‘speech’, so when I say I want something, it gets done. You can vote for whoever you like into office. You can try and petition your representatives to do what the people ask for, what the people need, but in the end, it’s not going to accomplish a God damned thing. Votes are meaningless. Being true to your constituents is meaningless. All that matters to politicians are the sweet treats we send their way. And let me tell you, nothing tastes so sweet like adding a few zeroes to your bank account. Those damn fool politicians are just tripping over each other trying to please us, hoping that one day we’ll accept them into our inner circle. Ha! We aren’t so stupid as to let something like that happen. They may lead a better life than you commoners, but they’re never going to know what real power feels like. Only a handful will ever truly know it, and we aren’t looking for any new members at this time.”

“So we’re just living in a new gilded age. An age where the pursuits of the common man do nothing but make you people fatter.”

“Gilded age? Gilded means something is covered in a thin layer of gold, to make it look more valuable than it really is. That would imply we’re covering up your shit lives with our glittering lives. Your cheap iron lives covered by our magnificent golden lives. No, this isn’t a gilded age. This is the age where we’ve convinced you commoners that this shit life is the best thing you’re ever going to have going for you. We aren’t trying to cover it up anymore, to make it seem better than it really is. We’re the pure diamond moon orbiting your dog shit planet. That’s the beauty of this age, we’ve beaten you people down so far and so hard we don’t even need to try any more. You’ll go on living your lives convinced that there’s nothing that can be done to improve it, and at this point, that’s true. We’ve systematically eliminated every avenue for the common man to lift himself back up. Want to educate yourself? Well, you’ll need to take out a crippling loan to pay for that. Trying to save some money away for the future? We control inflation so it eats away at your cash. Want to try your hand at investing? We’ll just manipulate the markets to destroy your returns. We already have enough wealth that it won’t affect us. Want to start a business? Good luck competing against our monopolies, where if we want to we can slash our prices to almost zero just to drive you out of business. We’ve happily done it before. We’ve got you people stuck in a perpetual cycle of poverty and misery. The system has been designed so just the mere thought of getting out of the cycle is nearly impossible. All of the information circulated out there is controlled by us now. What the press reports on – what’s allowed on TV and in the newspapers, what the eggheads in universities study and research these days. We're standing back in the shadows, pulling the strings, and no one ever seems to catch on to us. All of it serves our interests, not yours. If anyone tries to speak out, we can just as easily pay our ‘experts’ to disqualify them, convince the public they are nothing more than cranks to be disregarded.”

I was fed up with having to hear that shit pour out of his mouth. Before I was never really convinced of all the anarchy and people’s uprising nonsense that Pim and Paul babbled on about, but now after hearing Mr. Plunder speak, I wanted nothing more than to see his world burn. I was sure nothing would come of my actions, nothing significant anyway. Everything would just return back to the way it was, but at least I would have some satisfaction for sticking it to the man just one time. I was going down one way or the other. I might as well go down swinging.

“You can’t keep the people down forever. You can only push them so far, before they become fed up, and start to push back. Trust me, it’s already starting to happen. You might not be able to see it in your high ivory tower, but the winds of change are beginning to howl. Once I see out the rest of Paul’s plan, it won’t be long before everything starts spiraling out of your control.”

“And what are you commoners going to do? Start an armed uprising? We own the police and the military. The only firearms you can get a hold of are little peashooters, utterly inconsequential to the destructive force we wield. Go ahead, start your little uprising. I’d like to see how you fare against the tanks and attack helicopters and drones I have at my disposal. I just need to throw a few pennies at the right people and you’ll be blown to smithereens. So now, what’s your first move going to be?”

“This will be as good as one as any.”

I swung and planted the axe right between his eyes. Mr. Plunder's blood and brains covered my face and chest as they erupted from his forehead. I watched his body crumple beneath me, displaying how sad and pathetic the little man truly was. I’m not sure if he was so oblivious to his surroundings that he wasn’t aware I had the axe, or if he just didn’t care. Once he saw me walk in with it, he had to know what was about to happen. All that blathering of his was just a stall for time, a desperate hope that some of his guards or even the police would show up. Even if it were the police coming to arrest him, at least he would survive. Maybe a miserable life in prison would have been more suitable for his crimes. Living out a hollow life until he died of old age in a tiny cell, with the only thing to keep him company a toilet full of his own excrement. A full realization of the life he tried to create for us ‘commoners’. I’m not going to kid myself, though, he would have found a way to get off, or to at least go into exile with all of the money he had. His life would continue on much the same as it was, just in a new location, and more than likely in his summer home in the Caribbean. Mr. Plunder met as just an ending as anyone could have hoped for, and I’m glad I was able to serve as the judge, jury, and executioner.